Creating an Employee Attendance Policy: Guide & Template

Crafting a fair but consistent employee attendance policy can make an impact not only on your business’s bottom line but also on your team’s morale and retention. But it’s easier said than done.

Different employees have different needs: family care, mental health circumstances, remote locations, cultural holidays, you name it. How does a business take all of this into account while keeping the attendance policy consistent and compliant with ever-changing labor laws?

In this guide, we unpack tips, tools, and actionable tactics for creating a fair but flexible employee attendance policy — one that leads to happy teams, better productivity, and cost efficiency for your business.

Table of Contents:

• What is an employee attendance policy?
• 4 key components to include in your policy
• Handling disciplinary actions
• Optional things to include
• Free employee attendance policy template
• Optimizing employee attendance
• How Buddy Punch simplifies attendance management
• Frequently asked questions

What is an employee attendance policy?

An employee attendance policy is a company document that outlines your expectations for employee attendance, tardiness, vacation leave, and more. These documents provide clearly defined rules that are agreed upon by your team members during the onboarding process. 

Small business owners may think these documents come across as too rigid and formal to be worth implementing. However, an old adage rings true: it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Even your most reliable employees can run into issues in their personal lives (such as illness or relationship issues) that impact their attendance. One employee skipping days or showing up late consistently can influence other team members to do the same, eroding your company culture and impeding productivity.

Without clear guidelines, they may not even realize what they’re doing is wrong — and you may lack clarity on how to best remedy the situation.

Attendance policies work to reduce the odds that excessive absenteeism becomes an issue in your workplace. Both you and your team members benefit from having clear, mutually agreed-upon instructions to follow, and in the case of potential termination in extreme scenarios, attendance policies also provide a level of legal protection. 

4 key components to include in an employee attendance policy

The biggest issue employers run into with their employee attendance policies is failing to be clear and thorough with their guidelines. If you encounter an employee who sees an opening in the policy, they may take advantage of it — maliciously or not. This can create an environment of tardiness or absenteeism that hampers productivity and harms morale.

Here’s what you should include in your employee attendance policy to prevent this.

1. Your expectations for employee attendance

Before you go about crafting an attendance policy, make sure you have a clear idea of what your ideal workforce will look like. Do you allow employees to work from home? Is everyone full-time, or do you have space for a few part-time hires as well? 

These questions will drastically impact what you want to offer in your attendance policy. For example, if you’re fine with hiring students, you may want to include quite a few flexibility options since their schedules will be impacted by classes and exams.

If the type of work your employees complete can be done from home, that can impact how you want to handle sick leave if an employee can stay at home to avoid spreading illnesses yet still complete a full day’s worth of work. 

Note that you also want to consider the emotional and mental impact your attendance policy will have on employees. Being conservative with offering leave time may seem like the smartest move for greater productivity, but this does have a long-term impact.

Without breaks, you may find employees getting overwhelmed over time. Stressed employees tend to get grumpy, making them less collaborative and more combative. Just like that, a negative attitude can spread across your company environment and reduce how effectively your team accomplishes tasks.

2. Clear definitions of how absenteeism will be handled

One more consideration for your attendance policy is how simple it’s going to be. You want it to be clear to yourself, your managers, and your team members exactly what is being agreed upon in the policy. For example, you can say:

• The first instance of absenteeism will result in a verbal warning.
• The third instance will trigger a written warning.
• After four attendance violations, a disciplinary meeting will be held.

3. Definitions of the different types of absences

Getting into actual inclusions for attendance policies, the first major component is a definition of work absences. A work absence is any instance when an employee is not present at work. There are three different forms this takes:

• Authorized absences
• Unauthorized absences
• Unplanned absences

Authorized absences

Authorized absences, also known as excused absences, authorized leave, or approved leave, are defined as any absence from workplace duties that is permitted by you, the employer. Any period of leave time sanctioned by you or your HR department falls under this category, though you’ll want to include guidelines for how much upfront notice you want for this in your attendance policy. 

Common examples of authorized absences:

• Planned vacations: These are the most common types of authorized absences. Employees who work year-round without breaks tend to suffer a slow degradation in their work quality. In general, you want to allow your team members room to take time off guilt-free, as those rest days help them return fully recharged and ready to work. 
• Parental leave: This is another fairly common absence type, though employees should be letting you know well in advance when they’ll be needing this. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) offers 12 weeks of unpaid leave to eligible employees, but this only applies to federal employees. That said, many private employers use this as a guideline for how much paid leave they’ll offer for parental leave, if they offer any at all. The average length of maternity leave in the United States is 10 weeks, paid or unpaid.
• Public holidays: Public holidays can vary from state to state, so make sure you check when they occur for your business. 
• Time off in lieu (TOIL): Depending on your company’s model, you may want to employ a strategy where you allow an employee who has worked extra hours to accept extra time off rather than offering overtime pay. This is known as time off in lieu. 
• Medical appointments: The vast majority of these are planned in advance, so they fall under authorized absences. Sometimes they can be brief enough that an employee may simply come in later in the day.

Other examples include jury duty, voting days (with varying rules depending on the state), bereavement leave, leaves of absence, and more.

Unauthorized absences

Unauthorized absences, also known as unexcused absences, no-shows, or absenteeism, are types of absences that were not pre-approved by you as the employer. These are the kinds of absences you’re going to want to limit as much as possible in your workplace.

Common examples of unauthorized absences:

• Employees skipping work
• Team members consistently arriving late to work
• Employees prolonging allotted breaks such as lunch breaks or smoke breaks
• Employees leaving shifts earlier than authorized/warranted
• Staff abusing sick days by taking leave time without actually being sick

In some extreme cases, unauthorized absences may develop into a unique situation known as job abandonment, or voluntary termination.

Job abandonment is when an employee has a consecutive series of unauthorized absences but does not inform you that they’re quitting. The sudden occurrence of this no-call, no-show situation, in addition to the sense of not being sure of the cause or if it’s a temporary or permanent thing, places a lot of strain on you and your other employees. 

There are no laws that specifically refer to job abandonment, but you may want your employee attendance policy to outline a specific number of consecutive unauthorized absences missed after which point you’ll consider it job abandonment. 

Unplanned absences

The last type of absence you want to be sure to address in your attendance policy is unplanned absence. Unplanned absences, also known as unexpected absences, are any type of absence that occurs as a result of unplanned and unforeseen circumstances or emergencies.

Though these technically could fall under unauthorized absences, your employees have very little control over them. It’s important that your attendance policy makes it clear you understand the difference and won’t hold it against your team members when life happens. 

Common examples of unplanned absences: 

• Sudden illnesses
• Family emergencies
• Transportation issues (flat tires, engine failures, car crashes)
• Extreme weather conditions (hail, snow, frozen roads, hurricanes)

You want to make sure that you include guidelines for how employees should handle these unplanned absences. For example, make it clear you want staff members to report absences in as timely a manner as possible, even if that means being alerted minutes before the very same workday.

If it’s an illness, maybe require a doctor’s note to verify the truth behind the unscheduled absence. Try to keep in mind that things happen and sometimes an employee can miss work despite their best efforts.

4. Policies on tardiness and early departures

Tardiness occurs when one of your employees is late reporting to work in an instance when their lateness was not previously excused. Early departures occur when an employee leaves work earlier than their scheduled quitting time without permission. Both of these cases technically fall under work absences but are also their own situations. 

There are a few different ways you can choose to handle these scenarios.

• You can grant permission to team members to make up the difference by either staying late in the case of tardiness or arriving early the next day in the case of early departures. The goal of either punishment is to make sure an employee ends up working a full, even workweek by the end of the work period.
• You can consider charging their tardiness against their accrued compensatory time, accrued credit hours, accrued annual leave, or accrued leave without pay (LWOP). 
• A sterner tactic would be placing said employee on Absence Without Leave (AWOL). This non-pay status serves as an official acknowledgment that an employee isn’t at work when they’re expected. This is often a precursor to more severe methods of addressing tardiness.

How you choose to handle tardiness and early departure matters.

You may be wondering why these types of tardiness are even important if they’re much less serious than generally being absent from work. A team member arriving 5-10 minutes late doesn’t really seem like a major issue, right?

But imagine how your team members who arrive to work on time feel when one of their coworkers gets to arrive whenever they feel like it, seemingly without much questioning from you. 

At best, your more reliable employees will begin to feel resentment towards what they perceive as favoritism. At worst, an attitude of lax behavior when it comes to timeliness will spread throughout your team. 

What happens when your business experiences an unexpected surge of new potential customers, but half your workforce isn’t around to serve them?

Always take into account the long-term impacts of an employee abusing lax company policies when you’re putting together your attendance policy.

Handling disciplinary actions

Now that you know what sort of situations count as violating a standard company policy, it’s time to determine how you’ll discipline your team members.

Some business owners like to be strict, getting rid of team members that they judge to be slackers after a first or second offense. However, this means taking the time and energy to train a new employee from scratch, which gets worse the more specialized your business is.

It’s much more effective if you use a slowly escalating method to disciplinary actions, giving your employees chances to correct their behavior and become mainstays on your team.

Written or verbal warnings

Often used as a first step, these warnings are your way of flagging attendance behavior that you don’t want in your workplace.

Try to keep the language clear and concise, but it’s advisable to not come across as too harsh to your employee. Language that comes across as nonjudgmental and open to conversation can make your team members feel more comfortable sharing the circumstances of their situation and more likely to want to improve for you and the company.

Make sure to get the date and nature of warnings on record in case you need to later refer to these for further action. Alternatively, they can serve as a benchmark to look back on and highlight to show how an employee drastically turned around their attendance.

Write-up

This is a more formal version of the written or verbal warnings. Unlike warnings, this should specifically be written down to serve as a record for you, your employee, and your human resources department. It makes sense to implement these write-ups only after a couple of verbal warnings have resulted in no improvement in an employee’s behavior. A formal write-up should include:

• An employee’s identifying information
• An attendance record detailing the employee’s excessive absenteeism, tardiness, or other offending behavior
• Outline of previous actions taken
• Highlight company attendance policy violations
• Date of write-up
• An employee attendance improvement plan: a description of said employee’s next steps to improve attendance and avoid further disciplinary action. 

Suspension

A more serious form of disciplinary action, and as such you want to make sure you’ve investigated to make sure an employee’s absences are not covered by law and have been consistently addressed in company records. Suspension from work sends a clear signal that though you value their presence on your team, you can do without them, and it’s time for them to decide how much they want or need this job.

Job Termination

The final step in disciplining an employee for poor attendance behavior is termination. Like suspension, you want to make sure you have all the facts clearly outlined on your side and your employee’s side, as well as for your HR department. Reaching this stage should only come after multiple generous attempts to try and resolve employee attendance.

An example of disciplinary escalation

You have an employee, Bob, who is a perfectly adequate worker. After a few weeks of training, he took well to your tasks and even added his flair that you quite like.

However, after half a year of steady work, you begin to notice he’s gotten lax about punctuality. Where he used to arrive at work early every day, now he arrives 5-10 minutes after start time. Everyone else on your team manages to be punctual, and you realize they’re getting irritated that Bob isn’t.

It’s time to address the issue.

Your first move is calling Bob into your office and highlighting his repeated tardiness, inquiring if something in his personal life is distracting him. He thanks you for your approach, says everything is fine, and promises things will be better. For a few consecutive days, they are. Then he begins to get lax about arriving for his scheduled shifts once again.

This time you send an email. You took notes after that first meeting and brought up a few points, gently asking him to keep his attendance up. You also point to clear examples in your employee handbook of rules he’s violating despite agreeing to all of them during the onboarding process.

This time, he only improves for a week before going back to his new tardiness habit. And it’s spreading. Even Sarah — your best employee — is starting to come in a few minutes late. If Bob can disrespect the work schedule, why not others?

After your third reminder, you decide enough is enough. You go to your HR department, discuss things with them, and then formally write up Bob. Bob is shocked but promises he’ll be better from now on, for real. 

He is, for a solid month. But after that, he falters again, even showing up an hour late one time. Enough is enough. You call Bob into your office. You lay out all the facts: the repeated offenses, your attempts to make things right, his promises to do better that he failed to uphold, and the violations of company policy.

Bob has had enough chances, but he’s disrespecting you, his team members, and your company overall by not taking things seriously enough. It’s time for him to look for employment elsewhere, perhaps where he’ll be more comfortable. You part ways.

In this example, you did everything right:

• You started off small, with an informal verbal warning followed by a slightly more serious written warning before further escalation.
• You made sure to be empathetic and communicative at each step along the way to try and give Bob space to feel comfortable.
• You gave Bob multiple chances to turn around his behavior after clearly outlining what he was doing wrong and what he could do to improve his actions.
• You had a well-written company attendance policy that Bob agreed to as part of joining your team and referred back to it multiple times.

But Bob forced your hand despite a steady escalation of warnings and chances, so you terminated his employment.

Optional things to include in an attendance policy

Now that we’ve covered all the mainstays of a company attendance policy, here are a few optional clauses that you may want to include depending on your preferences and workforce.

Attendance point system

You are more than welcome to create a scoring system for tracking attendance infractions. Each point is another time an employee was late or absent from work. This way of visually tracking attendance can be highly motivating for employees to avoid accumulating too many points. It also makes it easy for you to see which of your team members are properly avoiding attendance issues.

We’d recommend clearly differentiating between tardiness or lateness as opposed to full-on absences. For example:

• You can assign a half point to employees that are more than 10 minutes late, but less than two hours late.
• Employees who are more than two hours late can receive a full point.
• Employees who miss their shifts entirely without alerting you or other supervisors can receive a whopping two points.

You can then decide that a total of six points will make an employee eligible for various disciplinary actions, such as the ones we’ve outlined above.

Flexible attendance 

Flexible attendance, also known as flexible working hours or flexible scheduling, means creating work arrangements that allow employees to exert a greater amount of control over their working hours — for example, letting employees fulfill their tasks from home if they’re sick without having to take a sick day. You could also allow employees to complete tasks in however many hours it takes. 

Adding this option to your company policy makes more sense if you have a hybrid workspace. This company layout lets employees choose if they’re working from home or from the office, as well as what their hours are.

If this style of workspace sounds ideal for you, simply make sure you add your parameters for what work completion should look like in your attendance policy. Otherwise, issues with keeping staff members on task could arise.

Free employee attendance policy template

Still need a little more help crafting your ideal attendance policy? We’ve got you covered. Here’s a template you can change and implement, completely free.

Click here to download the Buddy Punch employee attendance policy template.

As covered in the intro disclaimer, the rules outlined do not apply to absences covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) or the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Optimizing employee attendance

These tips and guidelines for creating attendance policies are all in service of one specific goal: improving employee attendance.

However, attendance policies are just one tool — and not the only one you want to rely on to encourage regular attendance in the workplace. Not when you consider how attendance policies are largely focused on what happens when attendance falls short of expectations. How about the opposite: a way to positively encourage regular attendance?

Employee attendance apps can help in this regard. These tools function to improve attendance in two distinct ways:

1. First, they make it less likely that employees will grow lax with punctuality. These tools come equipped with features that encourage on-time clock-ins and outs, provide noninvasive monitoring options in the case of remote workers at different job sites or at home, and can even place controls over things like clock-in locations, break times, and hours worked per day.
2. Attendance software also makes it easier for you to see when there’s an issue with an employee’s attendance, and it gives an employee more options for properly communicating and remedying their absence by alerting their superiors and trading shifts with someone else.

If you want a clear example of these attendance functions, look no further than our very own Buddy Punch.

Buddy Punch simplifies attendance management

Even with an ironclad attendance policy, you’re likely to have issues with employee attendance that eventually need to be addressed.

Maybe it’s the occasional stellar employee who likes to take a little longer on lunch breaks than necessary. Or perhaps you’ll have a group of team members who don’t mind clocking in a few minutes late and leaving a few minutes early, not realizing that their actions collectively add up to hours of wasted time and money for your company.

Remedying these issues can be like walking through a minefield. How do you gently yet sternly get them to improve their behavior? 

With a tool like Buddy Punch and its many automatic attendance tracking options, you may be able to prevent these issues entirely. Imagine how much smoother your workforce will run with tools such as:

GPS tracking

Buddy Punch’s real-time GPS tracking allows you and your managers to view accurate location data when it’s relevant for team members. 

Geofencing

Geofencing is an automatic feature that allows you to create a customizable radius, known as a geofence, on an interactive map. To encourage proper attendance, if a team member attempts to clock in or clock out while outside of your designated zone, they’ll be denied.

Automatic breaks

In the case of employees who take too long on breaks, you can enable Buddy Punch’s automatic breaks feature. Name your rule, specify how long into a shift before it kicks in, decide how long the break should be, and assign it to relevant employees. You can even make this part of your disciplinary actions for offending employees to help enforce your rules. Just make sure it’s clearly outlined in your policy. 

Punch rounding

This option lets you decide whether punches will be automatically rounded to the nearest predetermined interval you select, anything from two minutes to 30 minutes. This helps ensure team members are not clocking in before their shift starts or after it ends. It’s also a strong feature to use if your employees are punching in on one device, such as when using Buddy Punch as a terminal or kiosk. 

Paid time off management

For authorized breaks, Buddy Punch has you covered with a revolutionary option to manage all things PTO. You can create custom PTO types at will to monitor your employees’ leaves.

You can also allow employees to enter their desired time off directly on their time cards, whether it’s vacation time, sick time, or personal leave. When they put in these leave requests, you and your administrators will receive a notification for your approval or denial. Alternatively, you can automate PTO management by enabling auto-approval for trusted employees. 

These are just a few of the attendance features Buddy Punch has to offer. There are also other options, such as photos on punch to ensure no one is buddy punching and committing time theft, IP address locking to ensure employees are where they should be, and easy drag-and-drop employee scheduling to optimize team shifts.

Even in the case of unavoidable and unfortunate unplanned absences, you can rely on tools such as shift trades and swaps and notifications to ensure communication is clear so you can enact whatever changes you need in your workplace to make up the difference in an employee’s absence.

Buddy Punch can be used on any device with an internet connection, including Windows and Apple desktops, iOS and Android smartphones, and tablets. Access it via the web or as a mobile app.  

If you’d like to really button up your attendance management system, click here to start a 14-day free trial of Buddy Punch.

Optimizing employee attendance requires a mix of formal guidelines through attendance policies and a personal touch, but it’s more than doable. Adding software like Buddy Punch to the mix just makes it even simpler to ensure your business operations are running as smoothly as possible.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Are attendance policies legal?

Absolutely. Other than particular leave situations that fall under the FMLA or ADA, or rules that may apply in your specific state, there is no federal law governing attendance policies at all. 

How often can I change my attendance policy?

You can make as many changes to your attendance policy as you wish, as often as you desire, so long as your employees are not in a union with special agreements that state otherwise. That said, you’ll want to make sure things are kept fair and clear, and that your team members are given ample notice of any changes.

How do I know if I have a good attendance policy?

This is entirely subjective depending on your business needs and desired company culture. That said, what’s going to be most important is making sure you’ve covered your attendance expectations and infractions for all the common attendance issues a workplace can encounter.